Presidential Address: English Families and the Norman Conquest

There can be no question that the redistribution of land after the Norman Conquest amounted to a tenurial revolution of the most far-reaching kind. It affected the lower classes of society less than their superiors. The Normans possessed no clear-cut system of manorial economy which could be applied as a whole to a conquered country. The later history of England proves that no attempt was ever made to apply a uniform method of estate-management to the various forms assumed by English rural life. The social differences between Anglo-Danish and Anglo-Saxon England were as strongly marked in 1150 as in 1066. But it is equally clear that the Conquest had come to the higher orders of English society as a catastrophe from which they never fully recovered. It was completed within twenty years from the landing of Duke William, and Domesday Book, which is its record, gives conclusive evidence of its intensity and range. In 1086, although many Englishmen were still in possession of considerable estates, it was the rarest of exceptions for an Englishman to hold a position which entitled him to political influence or gave him military power. Two Englishmen only, Thurkill of Arden and Colswein of Lincoln, held tenancies of the first order under the king himself. The English lords of 1086 are clearly survivals from a society which had been shattered by foreign conquest and their place in the new order which had superseded it was obviously insecure.